Fred Rustmann, retired CIA Clandestine Services officer, joined us on Jan 8, 2004 as our first speaker of the New Year.  Rustmann, currently heads his own company, CTC International, which specializes in preventing industrial espionage.  Calling upon his 30 plus years in the intelligence community, Rustmann, gave an insider’s view of the US intelligence community and his thoughts on changes necessary to meet terrorist threats.

Rustmann began by tracing his career in the CIA that began in 1966, with field assignments directed at North Vietnam.  He followed this assignment with time in Paris assisting Secretary of State Kissinger in his secret negations with the North Vietnamese.  Rustmann returned to Southeast Asia and was involved with assignments in Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong and Japan where he led efforts directed at China, North Korea and other communist regimes in the area. Later he served in the Middle East where his efforts were targeted at Hezbollah.  Through anecdotes and examples from these assignments Rustmann was able to paint a vivid picture of the difficulties acquiring meaningful information about our adversaries.

Rustmann’s efforts in Vietnam brought home the tedious nature of intelligence, the difficulty of penetrating closed and racially different societies, and the tentative nature of the information gleaned.  Because North Vietnam was such a closed society and racially and ethnically so different, we could not just send agents across the border to spy.  Rustmann was therefore tasked to regularly interview numerous South Vietnamese people, with relatives in the north, and try to glean snippets of information that could be useful.  Knitted together with data from other sources, information could eventually be corroborated and vetted into useful and actionable intelligence.  What was evident from this discussion was the importance of human contact. Electronic surveillance has a place but it’s limitations that can only be overcome with “eyes on the ground”.

Another anecdote was used to give us an insight into the difficulty of acquiring and maintaining credible sources.  On an assignment involving the Middle East Rustmann described how they established a connection to a Hezbollah terrorist leader.  Through a daisy chain of contacts, which ended at the leader’s driver, very sensitive and credible information on the target’s planned activity was obtained.  The information eventually produced intelligence about a plan to assassinate a western diplomat in Syria.  Simply, telling the Syrians they had a problem and warning them to take action resulted in the death of the source in a “car accident”.  Terrorist organizations are more tightly knit than governments and often involve only family members.  When a leak occurs, and action is taken, sources can be easily identified. 

CIA analysts attempt to make sense of the disparate bits available by aggregating intelligence information gathered from a variety of sources, both human and electronic.  Eventually, the most important and salient information is presented to the President and his staff in the form of a daily briefing paper.  Rustmann felt that this information was as good and verifiable as it can be made.  While he admitted the CIA has many opportunities to editorialize and slant the information with their views, he did not see this as a big problem.  He allowed that Directors Gates and Casey might have been guilty of some of this.  Generally he felt the CIA was a responsible, professional organization that tried to get the facts right.  He agreed the events of 9-11 were a glaring example of a huge intelligence failure.

Looking forward Rustmann thought we should return to the days of the cold war and put more people on the ground collecting human intelligence.  He sees new funding for our intelligence services as being directed at this goal.  He feels we need to re-balance our electronic and human surveillance efforts.   The capture and interrogation of terrorists offers a new and useful source of good human information.  He did not see much useful information coming from the former regime leadership, however. 

Rustmann was bullish on progress in the war on terror, but painted a rather bleak picture on consistently penetrating terrorist organizations.  It will be more difficult than penetrating governments and we will continue to have failures.  He stated categorically that we would not be able to “stop them all”.  Terrorists are just too tightly knit, too fanatical, and operate too independently in small groups to expect complete success.  Rustmann felt that our best defense is a strong offense.

A lively discussion continued.

Rustmann made it clear that the CIA does very little domestically, despite fears aired in the media.  Under new rules the CIA can track foreigners that enter the country, but they still cannot surveil citizens.  The latter is the FBI’s purview.  He felt interagency cooperation was better under the Homeland Security Act, but he was quick to point out that there are still a lot of rivalries and risks of overlapping jurisdictions as the missions of both agencies expand to fight terror.

Responding to a final question Rustmann said that there is a lot of cooperation between the intelligence agencies of the allied countries like with the UK, France, Israel, Germany, and Russia.  Interestingly, he stated  “all the countries spy on each other”.  The exception to this statement was Great Britain. We have never spied on them and vice-versa.